2004-08-29 Eklutna Lake 2004-08-30 Matanuska Glacier 2004-08-31 Tangle Lakes 2004-09-01 Tangle Lakes to Denali 2004-09-02 Denali NP 2004-09-03 Jen's Denali Adventure 2004-09-03 Snow Hike 2004-09-04 Denali to Anchorage 2004-09-05 Kenai Fjords 2004-09-06 Sealife Center and Exit Glacier 2004-09-07 Glaciers and Game Refuge

Day 2 (Monday, 8/30/2004)

After a hearty wilderness breakfast at the MVL, we vacated the long house, loaded up the van, and headed back down the road to the Matanuska Glacier.  "The Mat" is a 24-mile long valley glacier, averaging about two miles in width with a four-mile-wide terminus.  It is an active glacier, advancing at an overall rate of 1 foot per day, and ice takes 250 years to completely traverse the length of the glacier from formation to terminus.  However, although the glacier continuously advances, the glacial margin is retreating from year to year, and thus the glacier is shrinking as it advances.  Most of Alaska's glaciers are shrinking due to global warming, but a few are still growing.

The Mat is one of the few glaciers in Alaska that is accessible by car-- for a small fee paid to the owner of the access road.  At the end of the road lies a small guide shack maintained by MICA guides, which sits perched atop the abandoned terminal moraine that The Mat has kicked up through decades of slow retreat.  The terminus now sits hundreds of yards back from where it was in the 1970's.  We were led by two guides, one of which was a charming New Zealander who had picked up the sport in the Southern Alps of the South Isle (the mountain range which represented the Misty Mountains in the "Lord of the Rings" film series.)

Our trek began with a brief hike over the powdery grey silt and gravel which forms the terminal moraine.  Our guide explained that the glacial ice lies only a few feet or less below the surface of the moraine, so the moraine is constantly shifting and subsiding with the ebb and flow of the seasons and even with the rising and setting of the sun.  New paths have to be picked through it daily as the sun warms the ice.  We arrived at a picnic table, perched precariously on the edge of the ice, where we fitted crampons onto our boots for the remainder of the hike.

Our hike gave us just a taste of this vast and rapidly-changing ecosystem.  We saw towering monoliths of blue ice (glacial "serac"), seemingly bottomless holes ("moulin"), several waterfalls, and a huge hidden lake entirely encompassed by the Mat.  Upon our return to the guide shack, we ate lunch and wandered around the terminus while waiting for the group of ice climbers to return.  Jen and Keith and I hiked down to one of the glacial vents, places where meltwater exits from the bottom of the Mat and forms the Matanuska River.  The vents can shift to different parts of the glacier on a seasonal or even daily basis, sometimes switching from completely dry to Class III rapids in a few hours.  The vent we explored appeared to be dumping a couple of hundred cfs into the river just by itself.  The climbers still hadn't returned by the time we got back from exploring the vent, so we hiked down the road to the river crossing and took some pictures of scenery and of a moose cow and calf that happened to be grazing off to the side of the road.

After the climbers returned, we all piled into the van again and headed back northeast on Route 1 toward Glennallen.  After a brief supply run in Glennallen, we took off north on the Richardson Highway, paralleling the pipeline and Paxson Lake for part of our journey before turning off onto the Denali Highway toward our next destination, the Tangle Lakes.